Niece G e-mails self this evening: she is taking a Creative Writing course at Stanford; would self be interested in going with her to attend a reading? She’s thinking of one this Wednesday evening. The speaker is Mohsin Hamid (Self had never heard of him) who wrote The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

And, in weird Pavlovian response, self finds her fingers moving (as if in a trance) to Amazon.com, where she types in a search for The Reluctant Fundamentalist and — oh, oh, self’s eyes go very round at the discovery that this book is ranked

# 4,130

Which is absolutely the BEST ranking self has ever seen, for any book she has ever searched for on Amazon.

(No, wait, that’s not absolutely true, for now self feels the itch to try one other search, and that is for a book that friend Sandy pressed on her last month, a book called The Secret. Tee-hee, tee-hee, that book’s ranking is an amazing # 2,091)

And, do you know what comes next, dear blog reader? Absolutely. Self then tries googling her own book, and this is the ranking of Mayor of the Roses, as of 10 PM this evening:

#878, 244

And, would you believe, self is now almost unaccountably happy! For above ranking is a big improvement over her book’s rank of a couple of months ago.